"The
government blocks everything it considers affecting its reputation,
without administrative process or rules," Jorge Salazar Lamas told us
via email. He's a 38-year-old financial analyst who lives in Caracas. "Here you can see a list of sites blocked,
but there is no transparency to the process. We can imagine that there
is much more of the Web that we cannot access from Venezuela."

Enter a company called AnchorFree,
which makes a product called Hotspot Shield. This is a VPN service,
short for "virtual private network." When browsing the Web through
Hotspot Shield, your traffic is rerouted through AnchorFree's servers
first, before they deliver it directly to you. You might use a service
like this for a number of reasons, but many people use it to protect
themselves from malware and to mask their geographic locations.

Because Hotspot Shield successfully
curbs Internet censorship in Venezuela, the company decided to make the
premium version of its iOS app free for those affected by it.